Flickr cleans house, plans to ditch Picnik and other features

Flickr announced Friday that it plans to dump a number of features, part of a “New Year’s cleaning” that the Yahoo-owned online photo service said will bring a “renewed sense of focus.”

Among the casualties is Picnik, the Seattle online photo editing service that Google purchased in 2010. In a blog post, Flickr said that it would discontinue the Picnik service in a few months.

“We know that you love editing your photos on Flickr and this transition doesn’t, in any way, mean that there will no longer be editing capabilities,” the company wrote. “It’s actually quite the opposite: we are working on making the editing experience even better on the site. We know you care about speed, simplicity and quality and this is exactly what we are working to provide you with. More on this soon, but we can’t wait to show you what we have in store!”

In addition to axing Picnik, Flickr said that it was moving away from supporting Windows 7 Slate PCs.

“While we continue to build the best photo sharing app for Windows Phone, we made the decision to discontinue its Slate counterpart,” the company said. “We see great traction with the Windows Phone app and are going to continue to release frequent updates, but the Touch-PC version of the Silverlight App will not be supported after March 20.”

Other features that are getting the boot including Flickr Clock, FlickrAuth, Photo Session and support for Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 3.6.

“We’re excited about what this year has in store for Flickr. With this renewed focus, we can bring more fun and meaningful Flickr features and experiences to you,” the company said.

Comments

Congratulations to Yahoo! on these bold moves! This shows a large, well-established company can still move with the alacrity of a startup.

Guest

Simply doing the bidding of their masters in Redmond. Removing a google service, nothing more, nothing less. With not a care for what their users think, or need.

http://offbeatempire.com Ariel

AARGH. As a Flickr early-adopter (coming up on 8 years of use), this just breaks my heart. The Picnik integration was awesome, although when Google bought Picnik, I did have to wonder how long the Flickr partnership could last. This is disappointing — at this point Flickr desperately needs to be adding features…not taking them away.